Lissac was exasperated.  He felt prompted to rush between Marianne and Rosas and say to him: 

“You are mad to accompany this woman!  Mad and ridiculous!  She is deceiving you as she has deceived Vaudrey, as she has deceived me, and as she will deceive everybody.”

He purposely placed himself in Mademoiselle Kayser’s way.  She had appeared scarcely to recognize him and had brushed against him without apparent emotion, but with a disdainful pout.  Her arm had sought that of Rosas, as if she now were sure of her duke.

Guy too, felt that he could not cause a scene at the ball, for this would have brought a scandal on Vaudrey.  He had just before repeated to Adrienne:  “Courage.”  This was now his own watchword, and yet he sought out Jouvenet to whisper to the Prefect of Police what he thought of his conduct.  Jouvenet had come and gone.  Granet, as if he had divined Lissac’s preoccupation, looked at him sneeringly as he whispered to the fat Molina who was seated near him: 

“Alkibiades!”

The soiree, moreover, was terribly wearisome to Lissac.  He wandered from group to group to find some one with whom to exchange ideas but he hardly found anyone besides Denis Ramel.  The same political commonplaces retailed everywhere, at Madame Gerson’s or at Madame Marsy’s, as in the corridors of the Chamber, were re-decocted and reproduced in the corners of the salon of the Ministry, and around the besieged buffet attacked by the most ferocious gluttony. Interpellation, Majority, New Cabinet, Homogeneous, Ministry of the Elections, Ballot, One Man Ballot.  Guy went, weary of the conflict, to the room in which the concert was given and listened to some operatic piece, or watched between the heads, the hidden profile of some female singer or an actor and heard the bursts of laughter that greeted the new monologue The Telephone, rendered in a clear voice with the coolness of an English clown, by a gentleman in a dress coat:  See!  I am Monsieur Durand—­you know, Durand—­of Meaux?—­Exactly—­A woman deceives me—­How did I learn it?—­By the telephone.  My friend Durand—­Durand—­of Etampes—­We are not related—­Emile Durand said to me:  Durand, why haven’t you a telephone?—­It is true, I hadn’t one—­Durand—­the other Durand—­Durand—­of Etampes—­has one—­Then—­And Lissac, somewhat listless, left this corner of the salon and stumbled against a group of men who surrounded an old gentleman much decorated, wearing the grand cordon rouge crosswise, a yellow ribbon at his neck, who, with the gravity of an English statesman, said, thrusting his tongue slightly forward to secure his false teeth from falling: 

“I like monologues less than chansonnettes!—­I, who address you, have taken lessons from Levassor.”

“Levassor, Your Excellency?” answered in chorus a lot of little bald-headed young men—­diplomats.

“Levassor,” replied the old gentleman who was the very celebrated ambassador of a great foreign power.  “Oh!  I was famous in the song:  The Englishman Who Was Seasick!”